Figure 69 Plan of Hellenistic city located at what is now Ai Khanoum, Afghanistan.
Source: B. A. Sparkes (ed.), Greek Civilization: An Introduction (Oxford 1998), p. 85, figure 5.1.
Blackwell Publishing. Reproduced with permission of John Wiley and Sons Ltd.
They told me, Heraclitus, thou wert dead;
And then I thought, and tears thereon did shed,
How oft we two talk’d down the sun; but thou,
Halicarnassian guest, art ashes now!
Yet live thy nightingales of song. On those
Forgetfulness her hand shall ne’er impose.
(Callimachus, Epigram 2, translated by Henry Nelson Coleridge)So, for example, Callimachus composed a poem entitled Hecale, of which only fragments survive but
which can be reconstructed with some confidence. It is written in the same epic meter, the dactylic
hexameter, and the same artificial dialect used in the poems of Homer and Hesiod. Likewise, it is
concerned with the heroic past of Greek myth. But it does not focus on the heroic aspect of the myth and,